dignity of the sea and its boundless freedom in their beautiful curves, which the abutting houses could not destroy, and even something of the sea’s loneliness in the far-spaced ports and cabin windows lit up by the lamps of the prosaic landsmen who plied their trades behind them.  One of these ships, transformed into a hotel, retained its name, the Niantic, and part of its characteristic interior unchanged.  I remember these ships’ old tenants—­the rats—­who had increased and multiplied to such an extent that at night they fearlessly crossed the wayfarer’s path at every turn, and even invaded the gilded saloons of Montgomery Street.  In the Niantic their pit-a-pat was met on every staircase, and it was said that sometimes in an excess of sociability they accompanied the traveler to his room.  In the early “cloth-and-papered” houses—­so called because the ceilings were not plastered, but simply covered by stretched and whitewashed cloth—­their scamperings were plainly indicated in zigzag movements of the sagging cloth, or they became actually visible by finally dropping through the holes they had worn in it!  I remember the house whose foundations were made of boxes of plug tobacco—­part of a jettisoned cargo—­used instead of more expensive lumber; and the adjacent warehouse where the trunks of the early and forgotten “forty-niners” were stored, and—­never claimed by their dead or missing owners—­were finally sold at auction.  I remember the strong breath of the sea over all, and the constant onset of the trade winds which helped to disinfect the deposit of dirt and grime, decay and wreckage, which were stirred up in the later evolutions of the city.

Or I recall, with the same sense of youthful satisfaction and unabated wonder, my wanderings through the Spanish Quarter, where three centuries of quaint customs, speech, and dress were still preserved; where the proverbs of Sancho Panza were still spoken in the language of Cervantes, and the high-flown illusions of the La Manchian knight still a part of the Spanish Californian hidalgo’s dream.  I recall the more modern “Greaser,” or Mexican—­his index finger steeped in cigarette stains; his velvet jacket and his crimson sash; the many-flounced skirt and lace manta of his women, and their caressing intonations—­the one musical utterance of the whole hard-voiced city.  I suppose I had a boy’s digestion and bluntness of taste in those days, for the combined odor of tobacco, burned paper, and garlic, which marked that melodious breath, did not affect me.

Perhaps from my Puritan training I experienced a more fearful joy in the gambling saloons.  They were the largest and most comfortable, even as they were the most expensively decorated rooms in San Francisco.  Here again the gravity and decorum which I have already alluded to were present at that earlier period—­though perhaps from concentration of another kind.  People staked and lost their last dollar with a calm solemnity and a resignation that was almost Christian.  The